People ask you. ‘What were you doing in 1994?’ for example and it’s generally difficult to answer. Our memories are good but they’re not stored in date form. But there are exceptions and these do enable you to work out an answer to the question. They’re the years for which you can always respond ‘yes, that’s the year I did …’ this or that easily.
1966 and all that. I’m not English but I am aware that England won the world cup in 1966. It’s something that some parts of our society won’t let you forget anyway so I remember it. And that helps me to remember my first year at University, my matriculation year that is. It was my year of transition from childhood and school education to university and living away from home. And as if to celebrate this transition it was the year of my first big holiday away from my family when I joined three others for three weeks in the South of France.
The photo above is an extract from the Freshers photo at Churchill College in October 1966 and that’s me dead centre of the third row back. Didn’t I look young? And note how many of us wore ties.
1976-1979 living in Hong Kong. I moved to Hong Kong in August 1976 and we, I married Juni in the meantime, left for Switzerland just three years later in August 1979. It was another period of transition from enjoying an unmarried expat life in Asia to one of being married and then, when we left Hong Kong, to living once again in Europe.
Although Hong Kong was still Asia it was also much more of a 20th century city (at that time) than Jakarta and there was more of a sense of mixing with a society at large with local Chinese being present in most of what you did. However there was still an expat community and that dominated my social life from the people I met in the bar after work to the rugby team that I played for at weekends.
Despite it being three years I recall it as a snap shot punctuated by just the one major event viz my wedding in June, 1978. The photo is of our wedding group just after we emerged from the Registry Office. Phil Judd on the extreme right was my Best Man but is now sadly deceased. Next to him is Juni’s father, Hakim. On the extreme right is Jamie Scott who is still active on Facebook and the other bloke is John Finnegan whom I last heard of working for a Mongolian bank. His wife, Liz, is to his left then it’s Jamie’s wife and Juni between me and Hakim.
I always claim that if you haven’t been to Hong Kong you can’t imagine it. However you do have to keep that experience current and I’ve been back several times since and each time I’ve been amazed by how it’s changed. I was there at the time that the Mass Transit Railway was just beginning to be built and my office at the time overlooked the World’s ‘largest urban hole’ as they built Admiralty Station. Now of course it’s been filled in and built over and the empty space between my office and the China Fleet Club maybe half a mile away is now densely packed with high rises. Hong Kong seems to change like nowhere else.
1984-1988 the Methocel years. I took on the Methocel business at Dow Chemical Europe as Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in the Spring of 1984. I didn’t know it at the time but it was in decline. There were three significant competitors, all German, and the major market was in Germany and Dow was being squeezed out. 12 months later we knew it was in decline and ‘something must be done’.
At the time Dow was largely a commodity chemicals and plastics company and Methocel was a bit of an outlier. It was a ‘specialty’ chemical and as such needed to be managed differently. And in the mid 80s its main businesses were doing rather well so that when my colleagues and I decided to change the way that Methocel was managed we were just allowed to get on with it so come 1986 prospects were looking up and a year later we were doing well enough to merit a mention in Dow’s annual report.
I was fortunate. I was supported by a new plant superintendent, Ernst Ryll whom I’ve just spotted on LinkedIn, an excellent Tech Service group leader, Jean Wittman, and immediate management support to just get on with it.
Of all my life experiences, the ones you might find on a CV, this is my best because it challenged me to develop multiple skills: working in a multi-functional team with Ernst, Jean and others, energising and directing a broad team of sales people over whom I had no authority, building an all round marketing program (it was my first marketing role) to support the product and going through fire to implement change.
The photo is of from our sales meeting of November 1986 when we reckoned we knew what we were doing and were positive about 1987. You can sense it from the body language.
1992 the Barcelona Olympics. I know that 1992 was the year of the Barcelona Olympics because I watched most of it from my hospital bed in Richterswil as I recovered from a hip replacement. It was a successful op, albeit after an infection scare, as evidenced by my hip still going strong with no apparent signs of wear some 30 plus years later.
Amazingly I was skiing earlier in the year but rather quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to get my hip done; the specialist had earlier told me that I’d know when I was ready and because of my medical insurance I was just about able to choose the day which I did and that was 3 Aug 92.
1992 was also the year that Clare’s football team viz Richterswil Damen u-13 won the Swiss cup for its age group. They beat a team from Basel in the final and the photo is the team with all its supporters after its triumph.
If the first half of 1992 was relatively good news that latter was less so as the Dow Chemical Company decided in its wisdom that it could do without me! However we did end the year on a high with Xmas and the New Year in St Lucia before I began job hunting in earnest in 1993.
2019 and 2020 my cardiac scare and Covid. 2019 started as a pretty normal year and included an excellent week in Sicily in April and a couple of days in Manchester to attend a wedding in June.
Then in the middle of August it all changed with an almost casual visit to my GP ending up with me in A&E before being discharged, a week driving round Wales (the photo is of Juni and I at the top of a wet and windswept Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth on day 4 of this trip) and then the firm recommendation that I be admitted to Addenbrookes before having a stent inserted at Royal Papworth just before the end of the month.
I’ve blogged about that experience but it was as life changing as any experience that I’ve had and I came out of it feeling a little more mortal than before. However the NHS was superb and I slowly regained fitness so that Juni and I could enjoy Xmas and the New Year first in Bali and Lombok and then touring Java.
But that was not all. In January of 2020 we had reports of what we later knew as Covid with a steady ramp up of responses and widespread lock downs in the middle of March. That changed everyone’s lives and although there were periods of respite and then more lockdowns it wasn’t until February 2022 that all restrictions were lifted.
There are other dates I remember of course, 1981 and 1983 were the years that Clare and Charles were born respectively, 1996-2000 were the Linx years and in 2005 I was first elected as a county councillor, but none of them have quite the resonance of the five above, none were at life’s junctions and none have immediate linkage with events within.
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